- Branche: Printing & publishing
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Led by Bob Moses of SNCC through the Council of Federated Projects (COFO), an umbrella group uniting Mississippi civil-rights organizations, the 1964 Freedom Summer was designed to send white and black students from around the country into the state to register African Americans. Whites responded by expanding their police forces and organizing Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations to meet them.
Within a few days of Freedom Summer’s start, three volunteers—two white people (Andrew Goodman and Micheal Schwerner) and one black person (James Chaney)— disappeared. The FBI discovered their bodies six weeks later buried in an earthen dam.
The disappearance, discovery and revelations about Klan involvement increased media interest in COFO’s work in Mississippi. This increased tensions between white and black activists, the latter having witnessed many blacks disappear previously without media attention. Registration of blacks in the state was limited, although the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party grew out of the Freedom Summer.
Industry:Culture
Like community, a fundamentally positive term in American society but nevertheless nebulous and contradictory. Historically, neighborhoods reflect the physical development and divisions of settlements through work, ethnicity and class. They may be united by public and private institutions—parks, schools, libraries, markets, churches, restaurants, bars and clubs—and also by patterns of face-to-face interaction and support.
This ideal has been challenged by changes in urban districts, since the Second World War which no longer represent class or ethnic enclaves. Migration, miscegenation, decline or even gentrification may be perceived as sources of destruction; nostalgic images of “the old neighborhood” clash with fears of “dangerous neighborhoods” torn by drugs and crime. On a more intimate scale, an ideal of good neighbors, in cities and small towns, opposes the massification and anonymity of suburbs and large-scale housing. At the same time, neighbors are expected to respect space and privacy, making the neighborhood a locus of feuds as well as solidarity Few formal structures of neighborhood government or identity specify boundaries and citizenship, although ad-hoc organizations spring into play to oppose policies, like urban renewal or busing, or to deal with perceived neighborhood eyesores and social problems.
Older cities may have wardlevel political leaders who channel local concerns into larger political units; “walking the neighborhoods” is important for city council and mayoral candidates as well as those seeking national office. Some neighborhoods maintain town watches for crime or celebrate community through street festivals and potlucks.
Neighborhood newspapers also promote community through local events and consumption—stores, yard sales, etc. In the 1990s, neighborhoods have also been championed as sites of renewal for urban action after the perceived failure of government development strategies—as exemplified in Boston’s Dudley Street project and community-development corporations (Medoff and Sklar, 1994). Business improvement districts, which tax local citizens and merchants to provide special additional services in garbage removal and security represent a more commercial interpretation, found in areas like Times Square.
Yet, patterns of exclusion, difference and competition within cities pit the interests of one group against another even if expressed in apparently neutral geographic terms.
Media may cover “incidents in Crown Heights” (New York City) or problems in South Central Los Angeles, CA, but place itself is less important than the restrictions and divisions that turn neighborhoods into confinement or fortresses. Indeed, geographies of fiction and news often rely on vague neighborhood labels that obscure the complexities of interaction, context and change that make such localities dynamic urban units.
Neighborhoods, nonetheless, provide massmedia settings imbued with meanings— Bedford-Stuyvesant as a black neighborhood for Spike Lee, or the class and ethnic readings of an earlier Queens in Norman Lear’s All in the Family. Neighbors may be depicted as nosy and gossiping, intruding on individual privacy or, conversely, unwilling to talk about or know about what is going on (familiar plot devices in both sitcoms and crime shows). Positive values of neighborhood are underscored in advertising, where one insurance company presents itself as “like a good neighbor”—a title also used to label US policy towards Latin America in the Roosevelt Era.
Industry:Culture
Like other nations that have engaged in the bloody wars of the twentieth century, the United States honors those who have risked their lives for their country. Official holidays of remembrance for those who saw combat in the armed forces include Veteran’s Day November 11, commemorating the armistice ending of World War I, and Memorial Day, in May. Meanwhile, politicians of the post-Second World War era, especially, have used their status as veterans to help catapult them into positions of importance in Congress or the presidency (e.g. Eisenhower, Kennedy and Bush). John McCain’s surprise performance in the 2000 Republican primaries owed a great deal to the candidate’s experiences as a navy pilot and POW in Vietnam, which gave him a degree of gravitas not shared by his younger and non-veteran opponent.
In a country reluctant to provide social welfare benefits to its citizens, the reverence paid to veterans is shown by the support available to them since the Civil War. Indeed, one of the largest departments in the federal government, given Cabinet status by Reagan in 1988, is Veterans Affairs (VA), which coordinates a range of benefits from provision of housing and education loans, healthcare and funeral assistance (including burial in specially designated cemeteries). Eligibility for veterans’ benefits requires ninety days of active service in combat or two years of enlistment, and discharge or release from active duty under conditions that are not in any way dishonorable. Those in the Reserve or National Guard currently (Congress must extend eligibility past 2003) need to complete a total of six years to receive the same benefits.
These benefits were dramatically increased by President Roosevelt in the GI Bill of 1944, intended to counteract the problem of readjustment many veterans returning from the First World War had faced (including great class turmoil). The GI Bill helped fundamentally to alter American society When the Department of Veterans Affairs was established in 1930, there were 4.7 million veterans alive, and the department ran fiftyfour hospitals around the country with as many as 31,600 employees. By 1993 the number of employees at the VA had grown to over 266,000; only the Department of Defense is a larger federal agency That the readjustment act reflected reverence for veterans, needs some qualification.
Indeed, the emergence of the VA occurred at a time when many veterans were facing considerable hostility. Those who came back from fighting “to make the world safe for democracy” and complained that the war had not done so, faced the vigilantism of the American Legion, with its 100 percent Americanism campaigns. Further, while the Second World War was “The Good War”and most veterans were welcomed home (although Wyler’s Best Years of Our Lives, 1946, challenges this), the Korean conflict became a protracted “police action” and many veterans returning from the “Forgotten War” felt that their struggles were neglected. The greatest hostility met those who fought in Vietnam, as the popularity of the war waned and as atrocities came to light. Vietnam veterans often felt reviled. In addition, fighting in conditions for which they often were not prepared, sensing the futility in the way the Pentagon prosecuted the war, they often suffered acute difficulties overcoming the trauma of their frontline experiences. Media depictions of the crazed or addicted Vietnam vet became ubiquitous during the 1980s.
Meanwhile, the Rambo movies suggested that the Vets themselves would have been able to take care of the Vietcong and/or rescue MIAs (missing in action) and POWs (prisioners of war), if the government had let them.
African Americans and other minorities (including female veterans, for whom the VA hospitals were unprepared) often were not revered alongside white veterans, whether or not the war was popular. A frequent cause of the lynching of African Americans in the South was the treatment meted out to the returning soldier. Nor did African Americans generally reap the benefits from the GI Bill, since they could not buy newly constructed suburban houses. The prominence of African American soldiers in the armed forces in Grenada, Panama and the Gulf, however, has begun to change this experience.
Industry:Culture
Like the institutions of which they are a part, university and college libraries have embodied in their sense of grandeur the loftiest of American educational ideals. As neoclassical secular temples, gothic cathedrals, Norman castles, Victorian palaces or outsized utilitarian buildings, campus libraries have served as the rhetorical center of their institutions’ educational program. Organized around a grand reading room with vaulted ceilings, the library functions as the place at the college where quiet reflection should yield lofty thoughts. Usually funded at 5 percent of the educational institution’s overall budget, and named either for the most prominent private donors who have provided the building funds, or for the institution’s founders or presidents, the library is that part of the institution that is least controversial.
At least since the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century (and especially after the Second World War), the numbers of volumes and the miles of shelving have been prominent markers of the relative ranking of the various university and private/public research libraries. Since the Second World War, even the biggest buildings have proven insufficient for storing the entire collection. Many university and some college libraries, even after numerous building additions and the installation of compact moveable shelving, have resorted to building or sharing large warehouses off site.
The older East Coast universities, Harvard and Yale, and the two eastern research libraries, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have claimed the honors as the premier institutions of their kind. The Library of Congress is the largest of the world’s libraries; Harvard the largest university library collection. These institutions, as well as their smaller private counterparts in the East and Stanford, the University of California and the University of Chicago, also amassed large collections of rare books and manuscripts from Europe, especially after the First World War, when the economic conditions of postwar life induced the wholesale transfer of cultural capital from the old world to the new.
The shift of the center of the university and college library world to the Midwest has accelerated after the Second World War. The American Library Association, the leading national organization of librarians, is in Chicago, IL, as is the Center for Research Libraries, a shared repository for special materials from libraries around the country The three great libraries at the Universities of Illinois, Michigan and Indiana have been lavishly supported by their legislatures as a marker of state pride, rivaling their Eastern counterparts in size of collections. Michigan and Illinois house the country’s premier library schools, having assumed that mantle from the private institutions, the University of Chicago, which closed its library school in the mid-1980s as did Columbia University in the mid-1990s.
But it is not just the massive buildings, the great size of collections, measured for more than one hundred libraries in the millions of units—they are members of a group of large libraries known as the Association of Research Libraries, which maintains statistics on relative size of collections, budgets and staffs—that distinguishes American university and college libraries. Unlike the European models from which they have sprung, the campus libraries developed a service component that, when successful, merges the ideals of the institution with the practice of learning. Professional librarians, trained by the country’s library schools, have made it a practice to humanize the huge scale of libraries and the information they contain for the students, faculty and researchers who use them.
The relationship between the individual librarians and their patrons, facilitated by bibliographic instruction, the creation of step-by-step guides to the use of the collections and services and the cataloging of materials into subject-specific open-shelf systems has distinguished American library practice for at least a century Using rubrics developed by Melville Dewey—the Dewey Decimal System—and the Library of Congress’ Classification and subjectheadings systems, the physical organization of materials by subject has been the hallmark of the American library.
Electronic information technology came later to the university and college library than it did to the general US economy but it has profoundly affected research libraries.
Sharing cataloging information was the first step: the United States was the first place where a standardized record format, the MARC (Machine-readable cataloging record) format, developed by the Library of Congress in the 1960s, took hold. This prepared the university and college library community to take advantage of the Internet, through the shared bibliographic utilities of OCLC (Online (first Ohio) Cataloging Library Center), the largest of its type in the world, and RLIN (the Research Libraries Information Network). The technological revolution of the 1990s permitted educational institutions to extend their walls outward through off-site access to research and undergraduate collections. This change has been felt most profoundly at the public universities, which have reached out to new populations through distance-learning programs, made possible by electronic full-text library collections. The librarians at the private and public institutions of higher learning have been at the forefront of making the World Wide Web useable and useful to students throughout the country still applying the same principles of service and cataloging, large collections and ease of access.
Industry:Culture
Like their ancestral European celebrations, American fairs have combined leisure, commerce and politics. State fairs annually showcase agriculture, commerce, industry natural resources, and domestic/folk skills alongside generous dosages of entertainment and Midway curiosities. This color and excitement has made them frequent settings for films and musicals. Other fairs may represent local/county celebrations, or bring together ethnic groups, streets or religious congregations. The image of the fair, in turn, has been extended to less celebratory settings like “job fairs” or “college admissions fairs.” See also: worlds’ fairs.
Industry:Culture
Literally, “pornography” means “the writing of whores.” The term is generally taken to mean “sexually explicit words and images whose sole purpose is sexual arousal.” However, in the last quarter of the twentieth century in America, pornography was at the center of a cultural, religious and political struggle. As such, pornography has been defined variously, depending on the group discussing it.
Pornography (if we understand it as sexually explicit words and images), comes in many forms in America. Justice Department figures from 1994 indicate that pornography is a 110 billion per year industry. This business includes: pornographic magazines; movies and videos (both professionally and amateur-produced, which became widely available for home rental with the advent of the VCR); and the ever-growing number of Internet sites devoted to pornographic images.
Pornographic magazines featuring nude and/or sexually explicit photographs became a recogniz able feature of the American culture when Hugh Hefner began publishing Playboy magazine in 1953. Playboy, with its nude but not sexually explicit photographs of young women, was the groundbreaking pornographic magazine and today is still America’s premiere magazine offering “entertainment for men” (Playboy’s description of its role). Other major magazines in this genre include Penthouse and Hustler, as well as Playgirl, which features nude photos of men.
Pornography, in the myriad forms in which it has made its way into American culture, has elicited not only sexual response from those who purchase and view it, but political and religious interest as well. In 1973 the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, based on the fact that no scientific data have conclusively demonstrated a link between criminal activity and exposure to obscene material, suggested legalization of sexually oriented expression between consenting adults. However, just months later, the United States Supreme Court, in the case of Miller v. California, wrote that any sexually oriented work could be banned unless it had “serious literary artistic, political or scientific value.” Although the Supreme Court ruling spoke of obscenity not pornography the two terms have frequently been linked by anti-pornography activists, and Miller v.
California has been used in many cases as a pretext to demand censorship of sexually explicit material.
Since obscenity has come to be equated in many cases with pornography, the term “pornography” has come to be used since 1973 to describe whatever sexually oriented expression a certain group dislikes or whatever sexual representation a dominant class or group wishes to keep out of the hands of other, less dominant, classes or groups. For this reason, pornography has acquired a social and political significance in America today that goes far beyond the pages of a pornographic magazine or a scene in a pornographic movie.
The most vehement opposition to pornography in America has come from the political right wing (particularly the Religious Right and the Christian Coalition) and from the pro-censorship/anti-pornography feminist movement, the latter led by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. MacKinnon and Dworkin define pornography as “sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words” (Dworkin, 1985:8). Beginning in the early 1990s, supporters of MacKinnon and Dworkin have unsuccessfully attempted to introduce legislation in several US cities, which would ban pornographic materials that they deem degrading or dehumanizing to women.
While attempts to censor pornography continue to be launched by political conservatives and radical feminists alike, pornography as a form of expression continues to be protected under the 1st Amendment. However, the question of child pornography and what constitutes it is something of a gray area. In 1982 and 1990, the Supreme Court upheld two state statutes prohibiting showing children engaging in sexual activity or in a state of nudity. The issue of child pornography became a real focal point for antipornography activists in the early 1990s. In one of the most visible battles, a series of print advertisements for Calvin Klein underwear was attacked by anti-pornography activists because the models, who were clad only in underwear, and not engaged in any sexual activity appeared to be adolescents and thus below the legal age of consent. No charges were filed against Calvin Klein, but, in a similar, high-profile case in 1990, the FBI investigated photographer Jock Sturges. The investigation was begun after Sturges’ nude photographs of adolescents aroused the suspicions of a photography laboratory employee. (At no point did the FBI claim the photos depicted sexual activity of any kind, and, in 1991, a federal grand jury failed to indict Sturges.) Thus, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with Playboy entering its second half-century, the battle continues to be fought between those defending Americans’ right to look at dirty pictures and those who wish to protect those same Americans from sexually explicit images they find disturbing, demeaning or dangerous.
Industry:Culture
Located in the Pacific, far from the US mainland, Guam occupies an ambiguous position within American politics, society and culture. This largest island in the Marianas chain, ceded by Spain in 1898, has been a primary American outpost ever since, including Japanese occupation (1941–4) and a hard-fought reconquest. Guam is an unincorporated, organized territory of the US, with a population of 133,152, whose people have been citizens since 1950. While they elect a governor, they do not vote in national elections, although they often figure colorfully in political conventions.
The Chamorros, Guam’s primary Micronesian inhabitants and language group, have mixed culturally and socially with waves of successive colonizers and immigrants from nearby nations (Filipinos constitute 25 percent of the population). Both military goals and development geared to contemporary Asian tourism (the economic bases of modern Guam) have threatened this heritage, as well as the island’s unique ecosystem.
Industry:Culture
Long a magnet for those pursuing the American dream, from the Gold Rush to the golden age of Hollywood, California grew explosively in the Second World War. Government spending for the war created thousands of jobs in a new defense industry and millions migrated to such places as Los Angeles and Oakland. Unlike previous immigration into eastern cities, in California a new type of “centerless city” emerged, creating a new relationship between people and landscape. In the thirty years after the War, areas such as Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Santa Clara County south of San Francisco, went from rural to suburban to “post-suburban” in barely more than a generation. Orange groves and ranches were transformed into industrial parks, malls, subdivisions and the freeways and roads to connect them, first proposed by business leaders in 1942, and underwritten by the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. By 1962, California was the nation’s most populous state.
The growth of California mirrored the general shift in population and power in the US from the Northeast and Midwest rustbelt to the Southern and Western Sunbelt. The shift paralleled the move from the old, industrial economy to the new information-based high-tech economy fostered by defense spending throughout the Cold War, but also increasingly by the high-tech innovations which filtered into the consumer sphere, especially those from an area south of San Francisco named Silicon Valley.
The Cold War brought billions of dollars in government contracts—the money which created jobs. The jobs brought people, who created the need for new houses, schools, roads, sewers and social services. Most importantly the people brought and bought cars, and the cars needed highways. Spreading outward, not upward as eastern cities had done earlier, with bulldozers razing orchards for more houses, offices, shopping malls and factories, these municipalities exacted enormous environmental costs.
Beginning in the immediate postwar period, both international capital and local political and business elites worked to fragment the environmental and social landscapes, most importantly through the proliferation of incorporated municipalities with separate, often separatist, “post-suburban” governmental units. White, middleclass residents in dozens of new outer polities sought, and discovered, methods for avoiding the burdens of urban citizenship (i.e. taxes), while shifting the costs of social services to the poor and people of color. The new, fragmented urbanism relied on growth and racial segregation, both of which would bring disastrous consequences.
The Watts rebellion of 1965 signaled that, despite the continued suburban ideal and the concomitant low-density housing, racial segregation in housing reflected and reinforced inequalities in power, leading to a breakdown of the social contract throughout California. Other developments in the 1960s highlighted major transformations in both the state and the nation. Berkeley’s student-run Free Speech Movement provided the bridge between the Civil Rights movement and the antiwar movement. The founding of the Black Panthers in Oakland marked a shift from civil rights to Black Power. For the youth counterculture of the 1960s, the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and, especially the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco stood as meccas of free love, hallucinogenic drugs and rock music performed at Be-ins and Love-ins by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and others, culminating in the Summer of Love of 1967 and crashing to a halt with the violence at the Altamont concert in 1969.
Despite the 1960s rebellions, California was more often a force for political conservatism, home to the John Birch Society and two Republican presidents, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. The reaction to the upheavals of the 1960s came with the “culture of narcissism” of the 1970s, when the personal liberation spirit turned into hedonism with a vogue for designer drugs, hot tubs and cultish, vaguely eastern religions.
Any remnant of countercultural or progressive spirit was overturned as the taxpayer revolt of Proposition 13 enshrined a me-first politics, paving the way for the Reagan revolution of the 1980s. The home-owners’ tax-revolt was hijacked by big business interests which engineered their own tax cuts, thus inaugurating slash-and-burn budget cuts to spending on social services such as schools.
The social and environmental impacts of postwar growth were felt continually by California residents. The folly of speculative post-suburban growth and the irresponsibility and unaccountability to the citizenry of post-suburban government was demonstrated by the bankruptcy of Orange County in the 1990s, the result of speculation in junk bonds.
Racial conflict, too, continued unabated. When, in 1992, four police officers, whom the whole world had seen on videotape savagely beating a traffic violation suspect, were acquitted, Los Angeles erupted in the largest single civil disturbance in American history The fact that the police withdrew from the neighborhood once the violence began only underscores the Los Angeles Police Department’s failure “to protect and to serve” areas populated by people of color. At the century’s end, new revelations of widespread lying on the stand by police officers led to wholesale investigation into hundreds of convictions obtained by false testimony.
The environmental impact of unaccountable power in the hands of proponents of growth increasingly weighed on the minds and bodies of Californians. While edge cities were supposed to counter the worst elements of urban pollution (“no dark, satanic mills spewing clouds of ash here”), automobiles filled the air with carbon monoxide and other toxins, semiconductor manufacturers filled the land with toxic waste, and drought, firestorms and mudslides in dizzying cyclical succession rearranged the landscape just as humans had before. Add to that the major earthquakes, which regularly shook parts of the state throughout the last decades of the twentieth century and Californians were truly living in an “ecology of fear.”
Industry:Culture
Long-established companies from opposite ends of rugged America that define an outdoor “look” and nature as a fashion kingdom. Eddie Bauer founded his sport’s store in Seattle, Washington, in 1920, later adding casual gear and women’s apparel to the expedition resources it featured. Sold to General Mills in 1968 (and retailer Spiegel in 1988), the store has expanded globally to $1.7 billion in sales, with 600 stores and active catalog and e-commerce trade backed by unconditional guarantees. Its rival was founded in 1912 by Leon Leonwood Bean in Freeport, Maine, whose waterproof boots for hunting launched a line of 16,000 guaranteed products and $1 billion in sales, primarily catalog and online. The main retail store in Freeport, open all day everyday has become a tourist attraction in itself. Their clothing and lifestyle items have been copied by other brands and successfully exported as an American style.
Industry:Culture
Long-established practices of birth assistance by knowledgeable females, reinforced in the nineteenth century by immigrant cultures, were effectively challenged in the early twentieth century by medical professionalization and concerns about health and hygiene.
Midwife-attended births fell from 40 percent in 1915 to 10.7 percent in 1935—the latter generally non-white. The Frontier Nursing Service and other programs focused on the disadvantaged sparked a new professionalization of midwifery in conjunction with nursing in the 1930s. This foundation expanded after the 1970s, when midwives came to be perceived as less intrusive, “natural,” home-based and even feminist alternatives to male-dominated obstetrics. More than 5,000 certified nurse-midwives, and other directentry practitioners (without nursing training) assist in prenatal and post-natal care for 150,000 births annually roughly 7 percent of all births in 1998. While serving rural and other areas where physicians are inaccessible, midwives tend to operate in hospitals and birthing centers rather than in homes, with limited responsibility in difficult cases.
Industry:Culture
